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INNovator Award

2024 Nonprofit News Awards

For an organization that produced an innovative idea or practice that had a positive financial impact on the newsroom and will help the newsroom serve its community or audience into the future.

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INNovator Award – Micro division

Brookline.News

Stories Live at the Coolidge

Based in Massachusetts, Brookline.News produces comprehensive local news coverage of the town of Brookline. In May, the news outlet celebrated its first anniversary with a live storytelling event that featured five Brookline residents who shared personal stories of resilience and transformation on stage at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

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A Soviet arrest, crashing a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out at age 14: Brookline storytellers help mark one-year anniversary of Brookline.News

Stories Live from Brookline.News

Finalist

INNovator Award – Small division

Dallas Free Press

Dallas Docu-editors

There are extra eyes and ears at local government meetings in Dallas, Texas, thanks to the Dallas Documenters program, which launched in 2023. The program prepares residents to cover public meetings that traditional media outlets often miss because of staffing challenges. The Dallas program is part of the national Documenters Network, which started in 2018 through City Bureau, a Chicago-based nonprofit civic journalism lab.

Read the Winning Work

The Oldest Park in Dallas Has an Uncertain Future

The Challenge and Opportunity Of Documenting Public Meetings

Dallas Documenters

Finalist

INNovator Award – Medium division

The Narwhal

Newsletter growth in the wake of Canada’s Online News Act by Arik Ligeti, Karan Saxena, Carol Linnitt

The Narwhal is an online magazine that publishes in-depth and investigative journalism about Canada’s natural world. In the summer of 2023, after the Canadian government passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which aimed to make tech giants compensate news organizations. Both Meta and Google threatened to block all news content for users in Canada — a move that, for The Narwhal, could have meant devastating traffic loss for the outlet’s flagship newsletter, The Narwhal This Week. Instead of panicking, the team at The Narwhal seized what they saw as an opportunity to build more direct relationships with their audience and revamped their newsletter strategy, Director of Audience Arik Ligeti said in the nomination letter. Those changes included using prominent full-screen popups to communicate to readers about the impact of the Online News Act and advise them to sign up for the newsletter to continue getting the facts from The Narwhal’s investigative reporting.

The newsletter list grew last year by 40%, adding 16,000 subscribers. The Narwhal team also learned a valuable, replicable lesson: a commitment to fostering direct relationships with the audience is critical to surviving and thriving as a sustainable news organization.

Read the Winning Work

The Narwhal This Week newsletter

Finalist

INNovator Award – Large division

The Forward

Clarity Amid the Chaos: How one news organization leveraged audience sentiment to increase results

In December The Forward, which covers the issues, ideas and institutions that matter to American Jews, removed the paywall from all its news coverage. “That means that for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is now free and available to everyone, everywhere,” Publisher and CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen and Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren announced in a letter to readers. “We are taking this step because during this chaotic moment of war, disinformation and rising antisemitism, open access to our independent Jewish journalism is essential.”

Read the Winning Work

An Important Announcement From the Forward’s CEO/Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

Finalist

2024 Nonprofit News Awards

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